


Minimum Wage

by plsnskanks (orphan_account)



Category: Villainous (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen, Violence, being very tired, its just flug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-11
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-10-08 03:57:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17379143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/plsnskanks





	Minimum Wage

He puts a hand to his head and stares at it when it comes away bloody. He can barely see with his glasses smashed somewhere in his general area, but the smear of red across his palm gets the message across loud and clear. The bag he usually wore to protect his identity is in tatters somewhere in the room and it hits him before any of the men in the room can.

He is going to die.

If it isn’t from the rapidly bleeding head wound it is going to be from the metal bat wielded by a looming meat locker of a human being standing over him like a muscular tidal wave waiting to crush him into the pavement further than he already has.

It was, admittedly, a brief and shitty life. Here he is, about to be murdered in his own office all because he failed to keep some wreck of a fake witness alive long enough to stand trial. It’s not his fault the man had come in with about half of the required amount of blood needed for survival and a good portion of his entrails outside him. 

Really. He was pretty much set up to die with this situation. Though the mafia were never known to play fair.

He closes his eyes because even though he can’t see, the vivid wash of red is making his stomach roil and he would like to go out about as peacefully as he can manage. As peacefully as a baseball bat can make things. 

He sees what at first he is sure is darkness encroaching on the edge of his vision. The sign he is fading into the afterlife and the tangible world as he knows it is fading away into abstract darkness, into the inescapable ether from whence he must never awaken.

Then he sees a wisp of the darkness reach out and grab the bat of the meat locker and crush it like one would a soda can. Appropriate noises included. The meat locker turns and looks at the darkness with disgruntled bewilderment.

Then another tendril wraps itself around his neck and. Well. There’s a pinkish red blob at his feet that he doesn’t need glasses to tell him is a human head because the body in front of him is keeling over and dripping a practical ocean of blood around his shoes.

He backs up away from the puddle and away from the darkness, which seems to push in after him. It surrounds him, thick, pulsing, needling at his skin like thousands upon thousands of teeth. It doesn’t give him the feeling of being between a set of teeth so much as it gives him the feeling of being in a stomach made of teeth trying to eagerly devour him.

He wants to cry out, so he tries and a piercing screech emits from his body but the thick cloud around him seems to be impenetrable, seems to dampen the sound so much that he may have well just been whispering.

He feels the teeth closing in, shredding his skin, pushing him into terrifying agony that he thinks he cannot stand a second longer until-

Until the sensation is gone and he realizes he has been squinching his eyes shut unnecessarily tight and opens them to see a rather innocuous looking man standing near him. He had a dark complexion with curly black hair and a mischievous smile. Teeth menacingly sharp.

“Ah so you are the esteemed scientist I have heard so much about,” there is a permanent purr lacing his words and he wonders how intentional that effect is.

He stares at him bewildered and then looks up at his hand and without realizing it, finds himself scampering backwards from the outstretched limb.

The man. Thing. Really he isn’t sure what to label this whole ordeal as, takes a step towards him, covering the distance he just messily hauled himself over.

“I hear you can work wonders, borderline bring people back from the dead,” he continues as if unaffected by his desperate attempts to keep space between them. 

“So,” he steps on his pantleg, at last putting a stop to his futile struggle. “Are you looking for a job?” Or a funeral service, the statement continues in the silence.

He finds himself shakily reaching out to grasp the tar black hand with his pale, near skeletal one. He feels a burning heat on the back of his hand, like he had touched it to a hot stove. He tries to yank his hand back but finds the energy in his body sapped and so he just relaxes into the pain as he stares at the face of his not so voluntary employer.

“Black Hat,” he says as he lets go. Like a wounded animal, he retracts his hand quickly and cradles it, examining the area that had just felt like it was on fire. He sees an insignia, a top hat not unlike the one on his employer’s head, branded into his skin. He doesn’t think to question how or why. He just takes a small relief in the face that he is still alive, whether it is at the mercy of this… thing, or not.

“And you?” Black Hat asks.

“F-f-flug,” he manages as he rubs the back of his hand in tight circles, hoping the prickling sting will go away faster if he just gets some circulation into it.

“Well Dr. Flug, I am pleased to announce your employment at my most excellent facilities, welcome aboard,” Black Hat says and he bends over to leer into Flug’s face before straightening again.

“First order of business, get rid of that,” Black Hat says, gesturing carelessly to the headless body slowly spreading more and more blood onto the floor.

“How?” 

“I am paying you to figure that out,” Black Hat smiled, giving the decapitated head a kick. It rolled itself over to settle at Flug’s knees. “However you do it, you better do a good job. Your payment depends on it.

“My payment? What is my payment,” Flug asks him, confused.

“You get to stay alive,” Black Hat says, grinning to show a set of wide, sharp teeth.

\--

It isn’t easy. Flug was never white collar, straight laced. He had, for unfortunate personal reasons, gotten tangled up with the mob, and as that entanglement was about to strangle him, he got himself in the debt of the human embodiment of H.P. Lovecraft’s wet dream.

He never slept easy, never had. But it wasn’t any easier with his new employer either. Black Hat kept odd hours with even odder activities, that, time and time again, often left him with a body to dispose of. When it wasn’t that, he had impossible deadlines for improbably technology to be sold on the Villains’ black market, the profits of which he was offered a mere pittance.

Ah well. If there was one thing he had become accustomed to the poverty of, it was money and leverage.

“Demencia!” his voice rings out, shrill and ineffective as the giggling girl tears her way across the lab with reckless abandon. 505 looks at her dumbly as she pushes past him, knocking him unsteady as she clears a counter without much effort and then turns to start rushing back towards him. He knows this game.

She has something he wants, she rushes at him with it and if he can manage he has to grab it from her or slow her down as she passes without letting her break it.

Except not this time.

This time, the object of desire this time is an orb that can freeze everyone within a ten-foot radius on command. Luckily the command is voice activated, his only at the moment, until he got Black Hat into the lab for a sample.

“Time set, five minutes, zero, zero, seven, stop!” Flug snaps out the last word so harshly he is sure the vocal recognition software won’t catch it, but it does and the girl is frozen mid-step. 505 is caught in the blast and is frozen mid stoop as he sought to help clean up the papers also frozen in the process of fluttering to the ground.

Honestly. That bear was the only thing that kept him sane somedays, because it certainly wasn’t the other two-.

“Ahhh, so it works at long last,” Comes a rasping voice behind him. Every hair on Flug’s body stands on end as he enters. His presence was like static electricity, sharp and startling, but hard to detect before one was already in contact with it.

“Ah, yes Mr. Black Hat,” Flug said, voice quavering. It always helped to play up one’s unease when around Black Hat, the man liked to know he could command a room and liked even more to beat down any stray nails that stuck out too far.

“Late, as always.” The deadlines were unreasonable, as always, but Flug had learned not to have a tongue when his first boss threatened to cut it out for him.

Flug was a man with debts and a past and that brought men like him in league with the slimier underbelly of things. He just had never noticed how far he had slipped until he found himself humming a tune to himself while dismembering a corpse, that by all rights, should have been in the morgue instead of some side room in a looming warehouse in the worst part of downtown.

Black Hat plucks the orb from Demencia’s outstretched hands, sneers a little at the gleeful expression on her face and turns to face him.

“Sorry sir, won’t happen again,” Flug says diligently, he offers a wry smile and tries to squinch up his eyes so Black Hat can see his sheepishness. 

“It had better not,” Black Hat said, and then carelessly tossed the ball into his hands. Flug caught it, nodded. Black Hat was already gone out of the room by the time he was about to ask if he wanted a demonstration.

Of course. Flug walked over to his drawer, pulled out a similar looking orb to the one he had in his other hand, placing the other one it it’s stead. The fake was made of quartz and worth maybe twenty bucks online. It was a worthwhile investment.

He placed it in Demencia’s hands and then walked over to a chair Demencia had upended in her flurry. He dragged it over with him to a counter where a Bunsen burner sat on low, heating up a beaker full of a thick brown liquid. Flug picked the beaker up off the burner, opened the cabinet under the counter and pulled out a mug. Upended the beaker. Shut off the burner. Sat in the chair.

He sat and waited, sipping from his mug occasionally, checking his watch again and then at last…. The papers floated down gently, 505 hurriedly resumed picking up the scattered papers and Demencia cleared the room while cackling wildly.

He sipped his coffee once more, pulled a remote out of his jacket pocket, and pressed a button that sealed the lab door shut and locked it. Placing his mug back on the counter, Flug stood, walked over to 505 and with a soft, “Thank you, friend” took the papers from him and began shuffling them into the right order.

He sighed in annoyance at the ones that had visible footprints from Demencia’s filthy sneakers.

A job was a job and this one was no walk in the park, but the threats of bodily harm and mortal terror came at least slightly less frequently.

Probably.


End file.
